Hart, Mallory Dorn

by Jasmine on the Wind

  Chapter 7

  The pebbles had rattled against the outside wall of the bedchamber like an out-of-season hailstorm.

  "What was it?" yawned Constanza, addressing the bare, muscular back that leaned over the window ledge as its owner peered down into the court two floors below.

  "It's my arms instructor, Von Gormach," Francho answered, turning back into the warmly lit room and the rosy, disheveled young woman lying languidly on the bed. "Something's afoot and he signals me to come down."

  "Now?" There was light dismay in her voice.

  "Now."

  "Ah, no, not yet, carido," Constanza wheedled, turning on her side and propping up her artificially blond head. She reached a round arm toward him. "Surely there is time for one more little kiss? Just one more? I don't see you so often these days." She ran a hand down her voluptuous body, preening. "Or maybe you have found someone you like better than Constanza?" Her eyes greedily took in her gentleman lover, barechested, built like an inverted triangle, the hard muscles bunched in his thighs and calves. The sight of the tall and handsome Mendoza scion thrilled Constanza still, even after the many times that that strong body had clasped, impassioned, and taken her own.

  But now he was sated. The same blue eyes that before had devoured her with undisguised hunger had now regained their usual glint of affectionate humor. He sauntered to the bed and leaned over her, flashing the warm but devastatingly dangerous smile that had seduced her in the first place.

  "No more kisses, little glutton. I know you, you will draw me into that siren's net and chain me once more to your beauty, and I shall not escape you till dawn." As he spoke he brushed his warm fingers slowly along the raised hill of her naked hip and watched her close her eyes against the tingles he was raising on her skin. Demons take Von Gormach, Francho thought, for he was finding the arousal of her lusty desire hard to resist.

  She shifted her plump body and seized his hand, cupping it on her full breast, where the nipple was already hardening at his touch. "Don't leave me so soon, mi caro. Can't you feel how my heart beats for you?" she murmured, wriggling seductively. She threw her arms about his neck, trying to draw him down to the tumbled bed where they had already pleasured each other twice.

  Reluctantly he took his fingers from the hard, russet nipple they were automatically caressing and reached to break her grip from around his neck. The compliant tinker's wife had been all that stood between him and death by boredom this last year at Mondejar, and they had evolved a very satisfying physical friendship for which both of them were greedy. "You are insatiable. Do you wish to kill me, cruel wench? I am played out." He laughed. He pulled her up by the arms for a second kiss on the mouth, then let her drop with a bounce on the mattress. "Von Gormach wouldn't disturb me—or his own tryst for that matter—for anything that could wait." His smile turned wry. "I suppose we should be overjoyed that he didn't decide to need me an hour ago."

  Constanza, realizing defeat, shrugged her shoulders and relaxed, pulling the sheet up part way. Admiringly she watched the muscles ripple under his smooth, pale olive skin as he poured water from an earthenware ewer into a bowl and washed quickly and vigorously. Francisco might complain of his long, hard tilts with Van Gormach and enduring the shock of the stocky German's fiercely propelled lance, of the strenuous dueling exercises with di Lido, whose sword was as flashy as his dress, or the demanding wrestling matches with his wiry instructor of history whose weight was about equal to his, but he also took a cocky male pride in the hard and bulging muscles all this obtained him.

  Although his back was toward her she saw his features in her mind's eye, so handsome one could cry, bright blue eyes lighting his tanned face, humor-quirked mouth both firm and sensuous with a square, full underlip, and his black hair curling softly on his forehead. Constanza sighed contentedly. Perhaps tonight it had happened, perhaps tonight he had given her a son just like him. The old tinker to whom she was married, who discreetly stayed late in his little shop because he liked the silver coins the Count's son left with his wife, could never give her a babe. But neither would the old stud ever admit it and so a baby by Mendoza would certainly have a home and a proud father.

  Dressed now, Francho came to kiss her goodbye, and she pushed her fingers through the dark ringlets on his forehead. "When will you come to me again?" she asked him.

  Francho reacted with mild surprise. "As always, Friday hence. You know that."

  She looked at him for a long moment, her dark eyes unfathomable. "It comes to my mind I will never see you again. Mayhap it is a presentiment? Is it true?"

  "Estúpida!" He slapped her sheet-covered rump playfully. "Who then would I see in this village if not you?" He was impatient to go now. "Come on, Constanza, a little smile to send me back to my heavy labors. I promise you, mi cara, you will see me again and again and again...." He tickled her rounded belly and joined in her laughter.

  Giggling, she jumped up. She watched him as he threw a long leg over the window ledge and climbed out onto the tree that grew there. He clambered from branch to branch and finally leaped to the ground, where the stolid Von Gormach, a man as wide as he was tall, awaited him. She chuckled to herself as she scratched her bare bottom. There was nothing to keep him from going down the house's wooden stairs. He just liked to swing from trees. Played out, indeed!

  "I sought you vere dead. Vot took zo long to zay goodbye?"

  "You great ox, I keep telling you, a gentleman doesn't leave a lady without a dulcet expression of regret."

  "Vell, she's no lady. You zay adiós, you don't make her vun of your poems."

  "What's in your craw that you can't wait to tell me? No bad tidings, I hope?" His mount was waiting beside Von Gormach's in the small, covered alley at the side of the house. They swung into their saddles and rode out into the dusty village street. Elderly women sitting and sewing at their front doors nodded at them and showed their gums, and then winked to each other once the nice young lord was past.

  "No, not bad. For you, I sink, very gut. A courier has arrived chust now from His Excellence to Pietro, and de little man vas smiling ear to ear. Go, run, Von Gormach, fetch Don Vrancisco, he zays to me, and qvickly. And he push me out de portal."

  "He did not say what was so urgent?" Francho found a few maravedis in his purse and tossed them at the delighted urchins playing about the village well while their mothers gossiped or slapped their laundry in a side trough.

  "No." Von Gormach shrugged. "You know him. Ven he vant not to say, he don't say."

  Passing the last house they broke into a canter. Excitement began to filter through Francho's blood. It had to be the summons he had been awaiting so long. Now, maybe now Tendilla would deem him ready to leave Mondejar, and maybe the arduous years of preparation were coming to an end.

  When he thought back it seemed like ten years he had spent in the draughty old castle pounding his brains and his body in a shape to suit his teachers, and yet, it was only three. And poor di Lido must think it even longer. The Count came and went between Mondejar and the Court, but di Lido had been requested to remain at Mondejar to supervise the training of Don Francisco de Mendoza and so only rarely journeyed away.

  In the beginning couriers were sent out seeking the services of several of Spain's most vaunted teachers. Those who were unencumbered by lecture schedules at Salamanca or Valladolid responded rapidly in the affirmative. They were flattered by Tendilla's attention, for he was the son of the late Marquis de Santillana, Spain's foremost author, and a patron of art and letters in his own right. Furthermore, he was most generous in his fees.

  Between three academic tutors Francho was exposed to mathematics, astronomy, history, and geography. Additionally, another teacher was provided to drill him in the etiquette of the Court, proper modes of address, obeisance, precedence, bearing and demeanor, plus the histories and insignias of Spain's noble families.

  Di Lido himself took on instruction in Spanish and Arabic literature, philosophy, and poetry. And, to Francho's a
stonishment, the precise little man also taught him swordsmanship, for anyone so rude as to goad the temper of this savant soon found themselves pinned by the tip of his flashing sword. Di Lido was a demanding teacher, insistent upon detail whether the definitive meaning of an obscure passage in Virgil or the exact position of the dagger hand during the sword's offensive motion. But his pleasure was so evident at Francho's quick grasp of the nuances of fighting with the sword and his lithe grace that Francho worked doubly hard to please him.

  Von Gormach, a German knight turned mercenary, was an expert instructor of weapons. He taught the techniques of handling a hunting javelin, a heavy jousting lance or a mace, and how to wield these with balance and agility while wearing a sixty-pound suit of jointed steel. Teamed up with a riding master who taught seat and form on either a light jennet or great war horse, di Lido and Von Gormach exacted such heavy physical practice from Francho that for the first six months his legs and buttocks were constantly sore and he could hardly lift his arms to get himself dressed.

  But, and considered the most important by Tendilla and di Lido, there were two additional masters who arrived just before winter settled gray on the plains: silent, effacing hooded clerics treading with downcast eyes, imported to instruct the Count's newly found son in theology and religion. To allow them the peace of meditation these two were quartered together in one of the further towers, and their meals brought to them.

  Francho was hugely amused by this strange pair of monks in their muffling robes, for neither was a religious. When one threw back his cowl a scarred, hawk-nosed, dark-complexioned visage emerged. He was a Morisco, a Catholicized Moor named Esteban Ebarra who had been born a slave, freed by Tendilla, and then taken into the Count's household. Ebarra's mission to Mondejar was crucial: to teach Tendilla's son the Arabic-Berber tongue of Granada and render him fluent in all aspects and intonations of the language. Ebarra, a man of few words but much intelligence, would lay down his life for Tendilla; to him this assignment was simple, there was no question of failure.

  The other pseudo-monk was Pedro Nunez, a middle-aged Andalusian of uncertain sobriety, puffy-eyed and stub-fingered, hired as an instructor of music because he was a most accomplished balladeer and musician—when not in his cups—and because he was not a frequenter of Isabella's refined court.

  Nunez alternated evening sessions with Ebarra in one of the tower rooms, which had been sound- and light-proofed with thick rugs and tapestries over the walls and windows. Declining to be curious about his wealthy patron's reason for such elaborate privacy, Nunez labored to impart some of his genius to Mendoza's son, instructing him in the lute and in the large body of Moorish and European music appropriate to it, as well as to the seven-stringed, flat-bodied African guitar, called the guembri. He had written down himself, in musical notation on a six-lined staff, many of the songs that until then had been handed along only by voice and showed Francho how to translate the mysterious squiggles into sound.

  Daydreaming of the past years, his mount so familiar with the road between Castle Mondejar and the village that the beast needed no guidance, Francho held an easy seat, his body seeming to flow along with the horse's gait. He chuckled to himself as he remembered demonstrating to Nunez what he thought was his considerable talent on the lute, only to see the man clap hands to his ears and wrinkle up his jowly face in pain. "No, no, you are strangling that poor instrument," Nunez protested, snatching away the lute from his abashed pupil. "First we will do finger exercises, over and over until your fingers are stretched and strengthened. But on a piece of wood, not on the strings."

  Oh, those exercises! It had seemed to Francho his fingers did chord positions in his sleep. Yet, a year later, in his loose-lipped, casual way, Nunez remarked on Francho's keen musical ear and admitted that his job had been much eased by his pupil's natural flair for music. Anyway, the dogged practice necessary for advanced fingering and speed was counted pleasure by Francho rather than drudgery, and he jealously guarded the time put aside for his music studies and practice. His mathematics tutor, who thought him an indifferent student, would have been astonished at his superiority in music and in that further study which also took a tuned ear, language.

  His days fell into a strict pattern, with very little surcease from the continual grind of learning. Had he less ability or less proud desire to master whatever Mendoza indicated was necessary for him to know, the unceasing demands upon his mental capacity might have exhausted him. But he aired out his brains through physical action, tilting with Von Gormach, riding, or wrestling with his wiry instructor of history.

  Friday night was reserved for a change of pace, a jaunt into the nearby village, when Von Gormach and Pietro di Lido (insisting he was present only as an observer of village life) took Francho to the crude tavern to drink and to dally with the local wenches. Von Gormach's capacity for mug after mug of a local wine, which he boastfully encouraged young Francho to match, was only halted by di Lido's incapacity to stay sober on the stuff, a "neutralizer," so he said, to all his various bodily complaints. The guards at the drawbridge were inured to the Friday night homecomings and managed not to grin at the tipsy trio, horses left slack-reined to make their own way home, clapping each other on the shoulders and roaring out the vulgar, offkey ditties they warbled at the moon.

  The sour note sounded Saturday mornings, when Francho suffered his pounding head through an early morning recital of the Ptolemaic principle of universe and di Lido moaned in his study with a cup of bitter herb tea. Von Gormach, however, to the petty irritation of his less able drinking companions, always appeared at an early hour his usual bluff self, with no visible effects from the ocean of drink he had floated home on the night before.

  Although Francho took his studies seriously, propelled by driving ambition to devote himself to excelling, the old streak of deviltry popped out now and then. Since he was certain his skill at thievery would come in handy sometime, he kept himself in practice by stealthily lifting the gold pomander off di Lido's belt, then returning it by stooping and offering it back with a bland-faced, "Your pardon, Maestro, but you seem to have dropped your perfumer."

  Doña María's rosary beads, Von Gormach's leather gloves, which he wore stuck in his belt, the dance teacher's clappers for beating time, and the major-domo's keys suffered the same light-fingered fate from time to time and were returned with the same straight-faced composure, the victims mystified by their apparent repeated carelessness— except for di Lido, of course, who found his Roman risibilities so tickled by the puzzlement of the others that he did not mind Francho's pranks. In fact he approved. Stealing was the one useful skill for a spy in which his charge was already well trained. Di Lido included this in the regular dispatches he sent to the Count to inform him of Francho's progress in all his undertakings.

  The Lord's days were left to Francho to do with as he pleased, and he spent them after mass in various pleasurable pursuits, hunting with his tutors, fishing, reading, composing intricate cancioneros, or dreaming. It was the only quiet time he had to think back to the past, what he now considered an aimless existence and which he no longer regretted leaving, although at first he was very homesick and sorely missed Tía Esperanza's maternal warmth and the friendship of Carlos, who was, after all, someone of his own age. Enjoying the sun in a corner of the ordered garden, he would reminisce to himself about the inn and his days of evading the law, and even sent his thoughts back to the gentle old monk at San Martín who had been both his mother and father in his babyhood.

  But for a long while it was Dolores that he thought of the most, and not only on Sundays. Her piquant face with its wide, engaging eyes and pink lips was easy to conjure up, and so clearly could he see her even after months had passed that it seemed those full, smiling lips were moving and telling him something and that he should listen. The memory of their last meeting together, especially the sweet passion with which she had responded to him, sent ripples of pleasure through his body, even as it unsettled him by invading
his mind at inconvenient moments with images of the soft, young breasts, a finally yielding body, and a shadowed face softening into helpless complicity. Dolores haunted him whenever he allowed his mind or body to flag. He even took to imagining how he would ride into Ciudad Real, the rich and elegant son of a grandee, and visit Papa el Mono's, where the ragged Dolores would gasp and gawk at him and he would make her a gift of money enough to buy her own hostelry and swear always to protect her and Carlos and Pepi, and she would take him into her bed and with tears of gratitude show him again those fragrant, pear-shaped, pink-tipped breasts....

  It was only after he had encountered and seduced the very accommodating, insatiable Constanza that the intrusive memories of Dolores and his yearnings for her moved to the back of his mind, neither faded nor forgotten, but laid away in the limbo of broken-off paths.

  The sharp barking of the dogs who bounded out over the drawbridge to meet them snapped him from his reverie.

  "Come on, Von Gormach," Francho yelled, rising in his stirrups. "A gold piece to the dungeon steps!"

  "Ja, ja, I vin it!" the German hollered back, delighted, and sunk his spurs into his mount. The horses lunged forward and thundered over the road, necks stretched out, eyes bulging, surging across the shuddering bridge and under the iron portcullis to skid to a simultaneous cloud-of-dust halt before the hoary, square tower in the court, with both riders vaulting from the saddle to race to touch the pitted wooden portal. "Basta!" Francho flung at the grinning Von Gormach, "I think you read my mind. I cannot steal a minute's march on you."

  He nodded to the grooms hurrying up to take their horses, and they strode off to find di Lido.

  "Ah, ah, there you are, Francisco, come in, and you too, Von Gormach, why not?" the Italian cried exuberantly as they opened his chamber door. He held up several missives with their seals broken. "The outer world has deigned to remember us all at once, so it seems, and with glad tidings. So! And which would you like to hear first, Francisco, my fine news or yours?"